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Defining a Three-Dimensional Political Permutation Space

That's just my pretentious way of titling Noah Millman's interesting, and largely successful attempt at a new political taxonomy, intended to dispel the confusion among the respective triads left/liberal/progressive and right/conservative/reactionary, and to employ the respective terms with greater precision than Americans in political discourse prefer (Americans tend to prefer to use terms in as slovenly a manner as they dress.) All such taxonomies are obviously open to critique, both as to their definitions and architecture, and their exclusions; bearing this in mind, I'm disinclined to attempt a critique of Millman's schema, as we're just not prepared for a political taxonomy in four, five, or six dimensions - three probably pushes the limits in America, with our fascination for the procrusteanism of the left/right binary, or alternately, the conservative/liberal one. Millman's taxonomy is not only serviceable, but illuminating, affording a more formalized means of explaining why, for example, conservatives concerned about place and locality don't get along with conservatives hymning the Dionysian glories of creative destruction: we're conservative reactionaries of either left or right, and they're right-wing liberal progressives.

Comments (6)

Is this a reference to my criticism of one of your statements, did I interject the idea that your writing can sometimes be pretentious into to your head. (I apologise for that by the way and I'll reply to your comment tomorrow in the other post (without the insults), I've just read it, I can't right now, its getting late here in Britain.)

Also, this is very interesting, I think his analyses could be more acute and in depth though. Thanks.

Actually, it had nothing to do with any remarks from any other thread, that aspect of which had slipped from my mind; things have to be much more personal to stick with me. Instead, that was just me being self-referential: yes, I know that this might sound really pretentious, but I'm going to say it anyway.

I have to wonder whether terms like 'left', 'right', 'liberal', 'conservative', 'progressive' and 'reactionary' have outlived their usefulness. In many respects, these terms are tied to the French Revolution and Cold War. At some point, all political labels become otiose. We rarely today see people called, for instance, Cavaliers or Roundheads. And add to the liberal / conservative divide the terms 'socialist' and 'capitalist', terms which are wildly thrown around, but seem to have a limited usefulness today. I wonder what the next wave of meaningful designations will be. What will be the post-Cold War divisions? Localist vs. Globalist? Nationalist vs. Globalist? Will it break down along ethno-geographical identities: Western, Middle Eastern, African, Asian, Mestizo, etc. (each with its own subdivisions). Or will the new division, as suggested by Serge Trifkovic and the Russian ambassador Dmitry Rogozin, be along the lines of the "Global North" (Europeans, those of the European Diaspora, and NE Asians) vs. the "Global South" (the Middle Easterners, SE Asians, Africans, and the majority of people from Central and South America) -- with each bloc above having its own natural internal divisions?

Can I just say that I don't think that his definitions are, actually, what people mean or used to mean or ought to mean by the terms? His definition of conservative:

Most human beings are naturally afraid of freedom, eager to hand over decisionmaking power to some authority. They frequently do not – cannot – know what is best for them. Most ideas are beyond their natural cognitive capacities, and anyhow people are not so much moved by ideas as by sentiments.

in no wise constitutes the heart, the core, of conservatism. At best, it indicates a trend of sentiment that results from one (and a somewhat overwrought) aspect of conservatism. It is ridiculous to call this the central concept, and it is deeply muddled, anyway: Conservatives are not the ones who say "people are afraid of freedom", they are more likely to say "people ought to be afraid of freedom (at least, some forms of freedom, i.e. license). To the extent that someone is saying people are eager to hand over decision-making, it is liberals, lamenting the "fact". Not conservatives.

Much more central, I think, is that of conserving: people have a right to maintain those goods which are now in place, absent sufficient evidence that conserving these goods is harming others. They are likely to set the bar fairly high on what constitutes "sufficient evidence". Some conservatives are deeply distrustful of individuals, but that's kind of an effect of the core outlook: individuals (whether they are perverse or really do know and act for their good) can be seen (not believed) to be acting against conservative standards when pushing for change without adequate support for uprooting the goods now in hand. The "authority" generally doesn't do this except insofar as pushed by individuals who foment the change.

But aside from this rather limited critique, which (admittedly) comes attached to a personal perspective, it doesn't seem like there is any really good reason for stopping at 3 pairs at all, as if these 3 were significantly more critical to what one means to the community than any other categorization. Much more seriously, though, any really thoughtful political animal is likely to have bits and pieces of each of those 6 elements, because he is likely to harbor various slices of thoughts that deny the universality of any one of those urges or temperaments. What if you are BOTH a liberal who thinks that personal freedom should be maximized AND a traditionalist who thinks that authority and custom is gravely binding on all? Because freedom, properly understood, includes personal, willing, and free submission to God and to his delegates, as well as true personal (political but not moral) autonomy outside the areas of those delegates' range of authority.

Conservatives are not the ones who say "people are afraid of freedom", they are more likely to say "people ought to be afraid of freedom (at least, some forms of freedom, i.e. license). To the extent that someone is saying people are eager to hand over decision-making, it is liberals, lamenting the "fact". Not conservatives.

In defense of Millman's taxonomy, allow me to make a few points.

First, self-identified political conservatives throughout the nation, for as long as I have been politically conscious, have been advancing the argument that many Americans are afraid of freedom, and have been "handing over decision making"; it is easy for these professed conservatives to believe this precisely because they are skeptical of human nature: most people are base and servile, and willing to be gulled by whatever the political left is selling. They are not, in fact, arguing that American should be afraid of freedom, but that Americans should embrace freedom; as these discussions almost always occur in the context of economics, the argument is that Americans should not be afraid to try, fail, and suffer the consequences without a safety net. Because the potential upside is so awesome, or something. What is transpiring in cases such as these, which one can encounter on talk radio on an almost daily basis, is that political conservatives are running into the disparity between their beliefs - which are actually liberal: people, if only they would lose their inhibitions and jettison certain political ideologies, would realize all manner of wondrous (economic) potentialities - and hard reality - namely, that people generally do not wish to embrace the complete conservative political programme, and seldom wish to live like Tony Robbins in pursuit of the life of John Galt. In other words, political conservatives are usually liberals of a certain type frustrated by the false consciousness of the American people.

Second, owing to the complexity introduced by the other dimensions, such as the progressive-reactionary axis, most political liberals aren't lamenting that the American people are so willing to hand over their liberties to faceless bureaucrats, or whomever. Rather, they conceive of the regulatory state as liberating them from brute economic forces, whether personal or aggregate and abstract, so that, thus removed from the domain of crude necessity, they might pursue the personal projects that express their freedom, their self-positing. Freedom is the liberty of actually doing and achieving things, as opposed to the mere abstract or formal opportunity to do them, should one be privileged enough to purchase the conditions of their possibility. Unlike most political conservatives, who are frustrated liberals, in Millman's sense (just listen to Limbaugh, if you doubt me, or read the recent Ponnuru-Lowry "American Exceptionalism" piece in NR), these political liberals really are what they claim to be - liberals - who locate the threats to liberal individualism in the politico-economic order generated by right-wingers, and their worship of success and power. Political debate in America occurs almost entirely in the liberal dimension, along the left-right axis. There are very, very few conservatives.

Much more central, I think, is that of conserving: people have a right to maintain those goods which are now in place, absent sufficient evidence that conserving these goods is harming others.

Again, in Millman's defense, I believe this ultimately reduces to a matter of the conservative temperament, or view of human nature: human beings are ignorant and perverse, generally incapable of knowing that some proposed innovation in our way of life - let us say, Wal-Mart - really does represent an advance of the frontiers of freedom, instead of a deformation of that life, and the imposition of a new servility. People have a right to maintain existing constellations of goods because those goods reflect the accumulated wisdom of generations, as opposed to the ambition of a huckster who has found a means of garnering wealth by upsetting the established patterns, who is more likely than not wicked and ignorant. As I said, there are very few conservatives in this sense of the term; what we have are, in the main, liberal reactionaries, who believe that individuals untrammeled by any effective social and economic order know what is best for themselves, but also believe that things were better in the olden tymes, with regard to sexual mores.

Much more seriously, though, any really thoughtful political animal is likely to have bits and pieces of each of those 6 elements, because he is likely to harbor various slices of thoughts that deny the universality of any one of those urges or temperaments.

Since Millman's axes are not binaries, but continua, where any point short of the terminus on one end will include something of the countervailing emphasis, I don't see the problem.

What if you are BOTH a liberal who thinks that personal freedom should be maximized AND a traditionalist who thinks that authority and custom is gravely binding on all? Because freedom, properly understood, includes personal, willing, and free submission to God and to his delegates, as well as true personal (political but not moral) autonomy outside the areas of those delegates' range of authority.

Well, my inclination is to state that such positions are abstracted descendants of early modern politico-religious postures, by which Protestant sectarians asserted a zone of personal and religious liberty impenetrable by legitimate sovereign political authority; where the dictates of divine law and conscience were perceived to be impeded by authority, but where the dissidents were not simply antinomians, there was the necessity of asserting this dualism: the divine law must be obeyed, but the adherents of the true faith must be free from the coercion of the (corrupt, illegitimate) sovereign in order to do so. I don't know how Millman would apply his schema to this historical situation, or whether he'd simply write it off as an outlier; for my part, it seems to me that such folks are religious liberals, in the temperamental, if not doctrinal, sense of the term, believing men to be fully capable of adhering faithfully to divine law, personally and communally, without external support. See also: fusionism.

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